Frugal MOOCs - The Future of Refugee Higher Education

23 Oct, 2017

Originally published by University World News and reprinted with permission.

There are 65.6 million people forcibly displaced to date. Conflicts in Syria and other parts of the globe have uprooted millions of people and placed them in unfamiliar locations, with often limited access and means to basic needs, one of which is access to education....

Donors Fall Short on Aid for Refugee Education

12 Oct, 2017

Originally published by Al-Fanar Media and reprinted with permission.

Last year six governments promised hundreds of millions of dollars to help educate Syrian refugee children. Human Rights Watch investigated the progress of those donors in fulfilling their pledges and says it found large-scale discrepancies between what was promised and what was delivered.

Online Study Scheme Gives Refugee Students a Degree of Hope

9 Oct, 2017

Originally published by the UNHCR and reprinted with permission.

War brought an abrupt end to Qusai’s efforts to become a lawyer. He had been in the first year of a law degree course at university in Dara’a when violence broke out in the southern Syrian city at the start of the country’s civil conflict in 2011.

In 2013, he and his family fled to Jordan and ended up in the remote refugee camp of Azraq. There, Qusai’s hopes of continuing his education seemed to evaporate.

How do refugee students make the jump to Germany's universities?

9 Aug, 2017

Originally published by The Christian Science Monitor and reprinted with permission.

An Afghan refugee born in Iran, Mr. Sohrabi says it wasn’t easy for him to go to school. By age 10 or 11, he was working during the day and studying at night. Sohrabi was eventually able to study English translation at a university outside Tehran for four semesters, but as an Afghan in Iran, even that was difficult.

A Mexican-Syrian Friendship Sparks a Refugee Program

31 Jul, 2017

Originally published by Al-Fanar Media and reprinted with permission.

Adrian Melendez, a Mexican, first met Jackdar Mohammed, a Syrian, at a freshly constructed refugee camp in northern Iraq in March of 2013. Mohammed, both a refugee and a volunteer at the camp, jokingly offered the Mexican a spicy meal. A year later that encounter had changed both of their lives—and many others’ lives as well. Read more.

Leveraging U.S. College Scholarships for Syrian Students

11 Jul, 2017

Originally published by NewsDeeply and reprinted with permission.

The Syrian Youth Empowerment initiative guides high-school students in Syria through the U.S. college application process. Its co-founder George Batah explains the importance of Syrians winning scholarships to study in the U.S. Read more.

Confronting the Higher Education Crisis for Syria’s Refugees

5 Jul, 2017

Originally published by EA Worldview and reprinted with permission.

The scale of the Syrian refugee crisis and the challenge of mitigating a “lost generation” of the education of Syrians is a critical one. As young Syrians struggle to enter higher education, they are navigating a range of complicated and often contradictory systems at local, national and international levels, between immigration and asylum policies on the one hand, and education policies on the other. Read more.